William Prochnau - Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett—Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vientnam Battles

Acclaim for William Prochnaus

O NCE U PON A D ISTANT W AR

Mixing painstaking documentation with the breathless writing of a movie script, Prochnau takes on this part of our national myth in an attempt to tell the story[when] young U.S. journalists based in Vietnam began to doubt the numbers, the strategies, the generals, but never the rightness of the American cause. The result often reads like a cross between The Boys on the Bus and The Right Stuff.

Boston Globe

In Once Upon a Distant War, William Prochnau does an almost impossible thinghe tells a Vietnam story we havent heard before. Complex, witty, and humane, Prochnaus book gives us an honest picture of the men and women who, for reasons sometimes noble and sometimes not, brought the truth of that war home.

Tobias Wolff, author of This Boys Life and In Pharaohs Army

William Prochnaus Once Upon a Distant War transcends the tiger-cage limitations of its genre and provides a worthy piece of Vietnam history and press criticism. Prochnau skillfully navigates around the prevailing myths. A valuable insiders tour of how the press works.

The Nation

Prochnau spares no detail. Each chapter is filled with harrowing accounts of journalistic daring. Once Upon a Distant War gives a clear picture of the workings of some of the brightest journalistic minds of the century and how their trail-blazing work would influence the many men and women that would follow in their footsteps.

St. Petersburg Times

Masterful and riveting. In vivid, supple prose, and with a novelists sense of drama and character, Prochnau perfectly captures the intoxicating, dangerous atmosphere of Saigon in the early Sixties. This book deserves to stand alongside A Bright, Shining Lie, The Best and the Brightest, and Fire in the Lake. Its a hell of a good story.

Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

Books by William Prochnau

A Certain Democrat (coauthor)

Trinitys Child, a novel

Once Upon a Distant War:

David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter ArnettYoung War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles

William Prochnau

O NCE U PON A D ISTANT W AR

William Prochnau is a former national correspondent for The Washington Post and author of Trinitys Child, an international bestselling novel. He has also written for Vanity Fair, Life, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and the Times of London Magazine. He made two reporting tours of the Vietnam War. A native of Seattle, Prochnau lives in Washington, D. C.

Copyright 1995 by William Prochnau

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

An excerpt from this book appeared in Vanity Fair. Portions of earlier drafts also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, the APF Reporter of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and the Gannett Center Journal.

Due to limitations of space, permissions acknowledgments can be found on .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Times Books edition as follows:

Prochnau, William W.

Once upon a distant war / William Prochnau.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8129-2633-1

1. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975United States.

2. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Press coverage.

3. Sheehan, Neil. 4. Halberstam, David. 5. Browne, Malcolm W.

6. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Journalists. I. Title.

DS558.P75 1995

959.7043373dc20

957327

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9780679772651

Ebook ISBN9780593082331

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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For my mother, Florence, and for Laura

Vietnam is a graveyard of lost hopes, destroyed vanity, glib promises, and good intentions.

The lead sentence filed by Time magazine correspondent Charles Mohr for an August 9, 1963, cover story. The sentence was not published.